Since February I try to be a friend of:
- JAVA2EE
- EJB
- Eclipse
- JBoss (with JDK6 !!!)
- JBoss Tools Eclipse plugin
(- Maven and m2eclipse Eclipse plugin)
And I'm struggling with them hard, opening issues in the corresponding project's JIRAs (and getting acknowledgement, that yes, this is a known problem), having 20 Firefox tabs open to try to find a solution for exceptions, but not finding exactly the same setup as mine (for example it's not JBoss but instead WebSphere or GlassFish AS), copying jar files to endorsed, cleaning up Eclipse to avoid crash, and ... I won't continue.
And people say to me: "yes, the learning curve is very hard/shallow".
Not neccessarily. I already knew these technologies one-by-one. They just don't work flawlessly together (let's say this way).
So I realized that the learning curve of EJB for example is not hard, but there's a curve which is very hard when putting all of these technologies together:
The sucking curve.